Customer Reviews

Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness

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Daja Wangchuk Meston begins his memoir dramatically with a desperate leap from a third story hotel window in a remote area of Tibet. It's a quick glimpse at a man pushed beyond his limits, unsure of his place in the world, and desperate beyond sense. When he jumped, he fully expected to die.

That was in 1999, and the author had been in the custody of Chinese authorities, suffering long days of interrogation with no sleep, accused of crimes against the People's Republic of China for his work on behalf of Tibetan rights.

The memoir then leaves behind that awful, desperate step--a step that shattered his heels and his life (both of which would take years to mend)--and takes us back in time to his first steps as a toddler on the Greek island of Corfu. Daja was born to hippie parents (Feather and Larry Greeneye) who hoped to leave behind the commercialism of their own American upbringing. When he was one, his parents travelled to India on a whim, and then on to Nepal to attend a Buddhist retreat. It was there, in the mountains of Nepal, that the author's father suffered a debilitating beakdown and disappeared, only to emerge from the woods a week later, disheveled and incoherent. He was sent back to the states (alone) and did not see his son again until decades later.

When Daja was three years old, his mother inexplicably delivered him to a local family (Tibetan nobles, living in Nepal) to raise. For three years he believed they were his real family--until they sent him, alone, at the ripe old age of six, to a Buddhist monastery to take the vows of a monk.

A number of privileged Americans have gone (by choice) to monastic retreats, seeking solitude, respite, and peace, but Daja's childhood was far from idyllic. Thanks in part to his pale skin and blond hair, Daja was treated as an outcast both by his peers and adult monks alike. And the indignities he suffered over the next ten years were Dickensian in scope: sleep deprivation, forced labor, lice infestations, constant hunger, humiliation, beatings, dysentery, alienation and isolation.

He was further emotionally orphaned by a mother who chose, herself, to join the monastic life of a Buddhist nun, shaving her head, wearing robes, and leaving the secular world behind (to include the responsibilities of parenthood).

At its core, this is the heartbreaking story of a lost childhood. It is the tale of one man's lifelong search for identity, belonging, and the welcoming arms of family. And it is difficult to read this book and fathom what the young author endured without feeling anger on his behalf. But the adult Meston refuses to stay in a place of anger and self-pity, searching instead for understanding and forgiveness. Fortunately, the redemptive ending brings us full-circle, and--as the title implies--comes back around to peace.

Late in this memoir, Daja Wangchuk Meston writes about musing on the impermanence of life. He decides that, when he dies: "I...wish to be remembered as a curious and unique person." The sentiment is as simple, humble and understated as the tone of this book. And this is a credit to Meston and his co-author Clare Ansberry, because had they indulged in grand and flowery prose, it could only have distracted from Meston's astonishing story.

The author has lived a bucketful of lives in his 37 years, and only lately has he come to fit them together, put them in perspective, and draw from this strange tapestry a sense of his own human value. This is understandable, when you consider that he's a white American born to a mother who became a Buddhist nun and a father who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown, partly raised in a Tibetan family until he was dropped into a Buddhist monastary, where he became a monk at the age of six and lived a sheltered, puzzled, religiously indentured life until, at 17, he excaped by means of a lie and flew back to the US, where he found himself in a California high school, speaking rudimentary English and astonished to discover that the world was not flat... Add to this an early marriage to a wonderful, willful. deeply troubled young woman, a pair of crushed ankles earned by jumping out the window of a hotel room in Tibet while incarcerated by Chinese authorities...

Whew! It's amazing this man is alive. It's doubly amazing that he has been strong enough--and wise enough--to sort through all the craziness and survive.

Comes the Peace is one helluva tale, by turns incredible, heart-wrenching and cautiously triumphant. This book not only tells the story of this "curious and unique person" simply and well, but it gives the reader a gift of empathy, an honest look at our skewed world through that person's eyes. We are premitted to see how it feels to be the odd man out, the minority of one, the new arrival to a life everybody else takes for granted. If Meston had to scramble to catch up, so, when it comes to respecting the cost of such effort, do most of us. There is much to learn here--about attachment, abandonment, family, love, salvation, forgiveness.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. May it fly off the shelves, and may we all appreciate our stumbling humanity a bit more for reading it.

Susan O'Neill, author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

This exquisitely written book will resound with anyone who has experienced emotional loss, particulaly in one's childhood. The experience of reading this chronicle with the author's capacity for forgiveness is a healing process in itself. I simply had to go to Newton to meet him at his shop, Karma, and was greeted by a man with the most beautiful eyes of amazing depth and a lovely smile. Start this book only when you can curl up and continue non-stop to the end. You will not be able to put it down. What a twist of irony it will be when Hollywood comes calling to make a film of this amazing life!

Mariel Bossert

This story is so unusual. I have never read a memoir like it. Wangchuk Meston has survived such trials of neglect and loss as a child that one wonders how he comes away with any sense of peace. But he does.

Perhaps he would never have learned all that he has learned if he had remained a monk. He lives the essence of Buddhism.

I highly recommend this book.

This book, Comes the Peace, was a very interesting book. Daja retells his experiences in a personal way that engages you and makes you think about your own personal history. The book is about Daja. He was born into a well-known Hollywood family on his mother's side but he doesn't get to enjoy the perks of a "famous" family. Instead he is raised by Buddhist monks in Tibet while his father battles mental illness in the States and his mother becomes a nun in a Nepalese monastery.

Daja weaves his childhood experiences in the monastery to tell a story about his transformation from childhood to adulthood. How the experiences he endured in childhood and the lack of experiences - family relationships and parental guidance - molded him into the adult he became. But he doesn't end the story there. He also takes ownership of his own life and decides to recreating himself into the man he longs to be and as he does that, the reader is given the inside struggle of his insecurities versus the confident he craves. His journey includes his religious state as well and he does talk about his Buddhist beliefs although it doesn't overpower the story.

The book is, in part, about how circumstances have an effect on who you are but that we still hold the power to go beyond those circumstances and we can be who we want to be. I would recommend this book to those who like to read encouraging and uplifting true stories.

I was introduced to this book my someone at my church. Daja was then invited to speak at our church. I really enjoyed this book. Full of very descriptive phrases for places, emotions and relationships it kept me enthralled. Although his specific story is unique there is much each of us can gleam from it. Can you forgive someone who has hurt you and can you accept them for who they are and not who you want them to be? Daja's story made me take a look my relationships with those who have hurt me and those I may have hurt. He signed the book " May this book inspire forgiveness" Yes Daja it has and will.

"Comes the Peace" shocked me into the realisation that the "compassion and love" that we all associate with Tibetan Buddhism is definitely being violated inside the walls of some Monasteries. Not only by the "monk police" but by the Lamas and monks themselves !!

This book was an eye-opening account of an American's boy's experience inside a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Here he was marginalised and tormented for being "white" and different by his peers and whacked over the head by Rosary beads when only a very young boy by the "monk police" for merely talking . This poor boy had been psychologically tortured.

Though through his sadness, confusion and loneliness he emerges with an inner strength and hopefully inner peace.

This is an important book as it may contribute to shifting the discriminatory and out-dated practises of one of the world's oldest religions. Tibetan Buddhism has so much to offer humanity but needs to abolish these contradictory practises and show TRUE compassion towards ALL the monks and not a priveleged few !!

An amazing and rare account of life inside a Tibetan Monastery from a Western perspective. A must read.

"If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now."
Mark Anthony's invitation to weep over the body of his fallen hero, Julius Caesar, might well apply to the life of Taja Wangchuk Meston, an unwitting hero of the Tibetan people, his family, his friends and just about everybody else except himself. As told in his poignant biography "Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness," Meston's young life stretched him out through tragedy, abandonment, abuse, disaster, and near death. The reluctant hero lived a childhood of deprivation and crushing disappointment only to rise phoenix-like into an uncourted celebrity. Like heroes throughout literature --from Oddyseus to Ishmael to Oliver Twist to Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caufield to Christopher McCandless ("Into the Wild")-- Wangchuk Meston carries a burden of hope on a cross of pain.
They are witnesses, and so is Wangchuk.
A major difference between Meston and these legendary figures is that he brings it all back alive --himself. Burrowing away after near death at the hands of the Chinese, the young writer doggedly hammered out his own story, not showing it to anyone and, characteristically, considering it trivial and uninteresting. Thanks in large measure to the central radiance of his life, his wife Phuni, he and his tale have surfaced in much the same way Ishmael did at the end of "Moby Dick," bobbing up from morbid seas on a figurative and literal coffin.
Aside from his moving, stunning lifestory, the miracle of Meston's book is in the writing. . .by which I mean the closely observed details and human characters he puts into limpid, gifted prose that comes out just this side of poetry.
By turns poignant and majestic, the elements of his life run silent and deep through the convergence of personal, historic, religious, and family forces that simply pour through every page. Meston is a born writer and, what is more, a born storyteller. He captures the corporal and spiritual beauty of giant figures like his dynamic, loving, uncompromising wife and his affectingly human, ruggedly spiritual father-in-law Apa, as well as his spiritually driven, emotionally blind mother and his schizophrenic artist father whose hidden beauty comes to shine out of his own painful life. . . not to mention the random cruelty of so many people he encounters along the way. It is a testament to the author's gifts that these and many other people come up against a reader's heart and stay there, like the living shadows that populate all good literature.
These people speak to you directly and emphatically in the pages of this astonishing book, and they go on speaking long after the book is closed. They form the nexus of sheer pleasure one gets through the author's incisive, luminous use of language.
You feel compelled to cry out, "This is a book! Run, don't walk, to pick it up and read it." The secret gift Wangchuk found, which he brings back pristine and trembling, is his own (and our)undiscovered, tender strength --something he could not have recognized during his overpowering ordeals. He also reminds us that organized religion, including Tibetan Buddhism, can be, and is, wielded like a twisted knot on the backs of the innocents, and that discipline imposed from the outside can very well wound, while inner discipline can bring great healing and enlightenment.
Readers who do not "cry, weep, and feel a strong sense of faith" --as H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama does when he hears the life story of the great Tibetan yogin and folk-hero Milarepa-- are probably blocks and stones, or just generally asleep to the stirrings of the human heart.
Christopher Swan

Daja Wangchuk Meston has written a fascinating and very brave and honest account of his life. All the players in his life, his mother, the monastery, his wife and himself he writes about with complete and utter frankness. This is not a hagiography but a very human book. By the end of it the reader is given a complete and very rounded picture of the motives of his mother, who acted in what she thought were the best interests for her son and which may well have been because the adult Daja is imbued with the qualities his mother wanted him to gain.

The story is totally engrossing. A testament to the perserverance and spirit of one man in the face of great adversity. This true story held my interest (indeed my facination) from cover-to-cover.